Living on a small holding in rural Alberta, raising kids and animals, growing stuff, creating things with fibre, and living with PTSD.
See more at www.applejackcreek.com.

01 April 2013

Not many words…

… but lots of threads.

Test piece with organic cotton, twill weave.

Many small pieces, all different colours. Twill. Will probably take the resulting squares and stitch them into a bag.

Lots and lots of threads. Most of which got handled multiple times as I made many, many errors in threading. Pretty, though.

Finally weaving. Realized that heddle 1 <> heddle 2 and modified the tie-up, miraculously changing the pattern into the alternating squares it was supposed to be!

About 20” wide, first tea towel woven to about 26” long. Two yellow stripes, peacock blue (which is like a really dark teal) for most of it.

Green linen weft. Feels really crunchy. Doesn’t draw in anywhere near as much as the cotton, should do interesting things in the wash. Expanded the plain weave in the draft to spread out the little boxes more and show off more of the weft colouring.

Plain weave: a study in mindfulness. You have to focus carefully so that you get even pressure on the beater bar (and mine has a wobble, so it always puts more pressure on the left than the right, meaning I have to position my hand carefully when I pull back on the bar). Lovely emphasis on the warp colours. This became an extra long tea towel (or I suppose a table center piece thing, like a runner but shorter?) at 27”, with one narrow pattern band at each hem.

There’s still enough warp on there to do at least two or three more …but I’m quitting for now.

The rest of the week is likely to be busy – I see my counsellor for the first time in a year tomorrow, and then I’ll be doing a spinning demo at the alpaca show later in the week, and a yoga-and-journalling workshop on the weekend. If things are a little quiet around here, don’t worry … I’ll be back with lots to tell you, I’m sure.